First, some ancient history
Back in 2003 I had the good fortune to attend the PDC that was held that year (my thoughts on that may well pop up in a future blog post, since they have some relevance to current circumstances). I took with me an HP Jornada 565 Pocket PC – this was useful for a lot of things if I tried early in the morning before the conference WiFi inevitably succumbed to the load, but blogging was not among them (owing to browser limitations and the .Text engine used by my blog provider at the time) - this in itself wasn’t a show-stopper given that there was always Internet Alley, but it’s the principle of the thing – you should be able to blog from a device of your choice, wherever you may happen to find yourself.
As a result, on my return I started work on a blogging app for Pocket PC (or Windows Mobile as it would eventually become). After playing around with proprietary SOAP interfaces I eventually switched to generic XML and naturally targeted the MetaWeblog API, not because of any affection for it (it is based on XML-RPC, which I personally regard as a stinking, grotesque abuse of XML and common sense) but because it was and is the nearest thing to a lingua franca for blog engines.
Early in the following year I released the first fruit of my labours, which was rather sadly called “Pocket Blog Writer” (while the blood of poets flows in my veins, it is not infrequently confounded by a programmer’s tendency towards literal-mindedness).
This was eventually renamed “Diarist”, partly out of embarrassment at the aforementioned over-literal name and also because I was utterly sick of everything with the word “blog” in it.
I eventually (if sadly temporarily) added support for Blogger by accommodating Atom pub, which I actually greatly prefer to the MetaWeblog API…a side-effect of this was that I unintentionally attracted a lot of Google hits by writing a blog post entitled “Fooling Around With the Atom API” – a lot of people looking for “fooling around” were presumably sadly disappointed. Seriously, people on the internet are such pervs. The Atom API itself was still under development at this point, but I successfully accommodated the shift to 1.0…and then Google chose to inflict GData on Blogger, with lots of Google special sauce (especially involving authentication). I managed to keep pace with this for a while, but eventually I found that I was spending too much of my time trying to deal with whatever had just been changed (often without documentation or notification), so with considerable regret I eventually had to ditch Blogger support.
In 2009 I bought a third generation iPod Touch and started work on a version of Diarist for the OS which is now known as iOS – that effort was put to one side when I began working on WP7 (although it’s likely I’ll return to it before too long – but probably for iPad, where it makes a lot more sense). However, working in the iPod/iPhone world did cure me of the urge to cram in as many features (and consequently, obscure menu options) as possible.
When I originally started work on the WP7 version of Diarist I made heavy use of the Pivot control – I viewed it as a way to simplify things and cut down on menus, and also to embrace the Zen of Windows Phone if you will. Unfortunately or not (because it’s possible this approach was a mistake to start with), I had to go back to the drawing board when Microsoft finally enabled Copy & Paste, because text boxes within PivotItems became effectively unusable.
Anyway, this week I finally submitted the WP7 version of Diarist to the Marketplace. There was an initial hiccup (read “rejection”) because I’d misinterpreted one of the requirements for icons and provided an icon with transparency where I shouldn’t have, but as from today Diarist is officially live and available.
I’d originally intended to charge for Diarist (because being a WP7 developer costs money after all, and also making some money would be nice) but I changed my mind at the last minute – I don’t think there will be enough people willing to pay to blog from their phones for this to be of any obvious benefit to me, and because of certain limitations (such as the fact that scrolling within a TextBox in WP7 is actually a pretty lousy experience) I didn’t really feel comfortable asking for money for this one.
Things worth knowing
Like the Windows Mobile version, Diarist for Windows Phone does not give you a WYSIWYG experience – instead posts are entered in a plain TextBox and what will eventually become HTML tags are encoded. In the Windows Mobile version this encoding used a syntax similar to BBCode – in the Windows Phone version it is BBCode, and a reasonably full subset (this means that some things that are not provided for by the interface can be entered directly as BBCode). There is a preview option which allows you to see what would actually be rendered, minus the effects of any CSS stylesheets your blog may use.
Diarist also uses Share Picker Extensibility – this means that in addition to the ability to insert an image into a blog post from within the application, you also have the option to do the same thing from Pictures (using the “share…” menu once a photo has been selected).
Another thing worth pointing out is that when adding a blog account to Diarist (which you’ll be prompted to do the first time you start it) it is often (usually?) not necessary to specify a value for “Remote posting web address”, which is the URL that gives access to the MetaWeblog API. The reason is that many blog sites provide an RSD file on the home page, which blog clients such as Diarist can read and find the the remote posting address for themselves. To find out if this is the case, you can fill in the first three fields and then hit the save button – if Diarist can find the address it will fill it in and attempt to validate your credentials with the service – if it fails to fill it in you will need to provide the value yourself and try again.
So there it is. If you’re interested, I hope you’ll download it and enjoy (as much as someone can enjoy using a mobile blogging application). If you’d like to see other applications written I’d very much appreciate it if you’d use the contact form to let me know what you have in mind (yeah, I know I need to get around to implementing comments on this blog).
Update: I originally said the Share Picker Extensibility feature was exposed via the “extras” menu on Pictures, which is of course incorrect. It’s via the “share…” menu.
I’ve submitted an update to the Marketplace with a corrected description (where it mentions the Share Picker Extensibility bit) and with a code fix for a nasty bug that was reported to me a little while ago (return characters not being converted to <br /> or <p /> – I thought I could trust Environment.NewLine, but it turns out I was mistaken).